Ground Systems Advances and Technologies

As President of SIA, Tom Stroup is the trade association’s lead advocate for regulatory and policy issues of critical importance to SIA’s membership, including spectrum and licensing issues, defense and public safety matters, and export control and international trade issues. He also manages the day-to-day operations of SIA, including member communications, staff leadership and organization of SIA sponsored events.

Prior to joining SIA, Mr. Stroup was with Shared Spectrum Company (SSC), a leading developer of spectrum intelligence technologies, where he served as CEO. For more than a decade, he served as the President of the Personal Communications Industry Association (PCIA). Previous to his position at SSC, he founded and ran several companies in the technology industry, including Columbia Spectrum Management, P-Com Network Services, CSM Wireless, and SquareLoop.

Mr. Stroup holds a BS, summa cum laude, in Public Administration from the University of North Dakota. He is also a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center where he served as Editor of the Georgetown Law Journal.

Brad brings over 21 years of software development experience in the aerospace industry to the ATLAS team. He has designed, developed, tested, and deployed satellite command and control, mission planning, and data management applications throughout his career. Now, Brad is the genius behind the ground-breaking Freedom™ Software Platform. He holds an MS in Computer Science from Northern Illinois University.

David Provencher, Vice President & Director of New Business Development at AvL Technologies – Dave has 30+ years of experience in the telecommunications industry including roles in engineering and program management at Harris Government Communications Systems Division and IBM Federal Systems Division. He served in executive management positions including VP and GM at Andrew Kintec, President and GM at Cobham Satcom Land Systems, and was founder and President of TracStar Systems, Inc. Dave has an engineering degree from the University of Central Florida where he also holds a courtesy faculty position.

Dr. Rosenberg is a co-founder of Wavestream Corporation, a leading manufacturer of SSPAs, BUCs, and transceivers for satellite communications. He serves as Wavestream’s Chief Technology Officer.

He is co-inventor of the pseudomorphic High Electron Mobility Transistor (pHEMT), and of the Grid Amplifier, a chip-level spatial combiner capable of efficiently combining the outputs of hundreds of transistors in a single combining step. He is author/co-author of over 50 publications in refereed journals and conference proceeding on semiconductor devices, semiconductor processing, and microwave/mm-wave amplifiers and sources, and co-author of a textbook on engineering modeling and analysis. He is inventor/co-inventor on 13 US patents and 20 non-US patents.

He received the Sc.B. Degree in Engineering from Brown University, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from U. C. Berkeley, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University.

He was a recipient of a National Science Foundation Fellowship, Faculty Development Awards from both IBM Corporation and AT&T, and the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. Member of Tau Beta Pi.

Serving as Deputy Manager of JPL’s MicroDevices Lab, he oversaw the start-up of the laboratory, and led the development of new high-speed optical communications products as Director of Engineering at GPD Optoelectronics. He has held professorships at Brown University and Harvey Mudd College, and was a Research Associate at California Institute of Technology.

Tim Shroyer is the Chief Technology Officer of the Satcom & Antenna Technologies Division of Communications and Power Industries, LLC, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of satellite communications antennas, power amplifiers, and earth station equipment.  He is a satellite communications systems engineer and has managed, designed, built, installed, and operated satellite earth stations around the world.

Mr. Shroyer has designed and installed uplink stations of all types in many countries, in all the world’s continents, and developed new earth station architectures including pioneering the development of L-Band IF (Intermediate Frequency) systems, now common in commercial and military satcom.  He was one of the principal architects of Satcom-On-The-Move Systems.  He has worked closely with the Federal Communications Commission in the United States to create a licensing class for this entirely new generation of satellite communications systems.

Mr. Shroyer’s first satellite communications experience was as an officer in the United States Navy and with the Defense Information Systems Agency.  While at Stanford Telecommunications he served as the Program Manager for the development and installation of the Network Control system that still manages U.S. military communications satellites.  Since that time he has managed the development and installation of satellite Network Control and TT&C (Telemetry, Tracking and Control) systems for many satellite networks around the world.  He also was the founder and president of a VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) transceiver manufacturing company.

Frederik Simoens is the Chief Technology Officer at ST Engineering iDirect, where he is responsible for the oversight of all technology decisions and serves to drive the strategic direction for product development, technology roadmap and technology alliances.

Previously, Simoens worked at Newtec where he worked on physical layer technologies, launched the DVB-S2X standard within Newtec’s platform, and in 2015, became VP of product management, which led to a promotion to CTO.

His key areas of expertise include physical layer technologies, satellite communications and digital modems. He is also a guest lecturer at the University of Ghent and is the author of 40+ publications.

Simoens obtained a Master degree in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. degree in digital communications, both from the University of Ghent. He also holds an MBA degree from the Vlerick Business School.